Monday, June 27, 2011

well, this post is a little late, sorry! i received this a couple of weeks ago, thank you very much to Richard, Mr Sculpture Of A Bloke himself!

the Manic Street Preachers, bless them, do have some funny ideas about releasing things. the three singles off their last album, Postcards From A Young Man, didn't do very well at all in the charts. bass player and lyric king Nicky Wire had expressed a wish to be successful with the singles selected from the album, and in fairness they were not bad songs. however, promoting them weeks (!) before their release, doing nothing in regards of promotion for them in the week they first went on sale (and would have charted the best) and making it very difficult to find where to buy them kind of counted against them.

even more interesting than this was the bizarre approach they have taken with their first "single proper", Motown Junk, and the decision to re-release it, for the first time ever as a 7", to mark the 20th anniversary of the original release.

cool idea, bad implementation. for some reason they limited it to one thousand copies, and first made them available from only two venues at two very specific times.

thankfully, my mate mentioned above was at one of the venues and grabbed me one!

nice one! very much appreciated!

the approach taken is peculiar because the band seems to want some chart success at the moment. no bad thing. add to this the fact that Motown Junk only ever got to 92 in the charts on its first release, yet became a firm fan favourite over the lats two decades, and you have all the ingredients for a proper re-release to give the song proper exposure and a much better chart position.

issuing only one thousand non-chart eligible copies (no bar code) doesn't strike me as a way of charting. as us Manics fans like buying pretty/ugly things just because they have "Manic Street Preachers" written on them, i am very surprised at the lack of interest the band and the label had with this release. http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

alas, all official copies have now sold out, so you can just admire my pictures and listen to the a side and b side here if you so wish. otherwise, if you are an obsessive and want to buy it, the most famous auction site on the whole interwebnet has copies, but at a price.

in regards of the latter, i would really warn you against buying. as glad as i am to have this record, it has been made as cheaply as possible. it is a very lightweight piece of vinyl indeed - audio enthusiasts beware!

right, off to listen to my other new record, post to follow shortly...